《《1998_CLP 28_Later Chinese Painting_Innovation After Progress Ends》.doc

1998_CLP 28_Later Chinese Painting: Innovation After Progress Ends (Introductory congratulations, espec. to hired guns, Sherman Lee, Howard Rogers, Jane Debevoise.) In putting together this lecture, I had the slightly uncomfortable sense that it was more or less fated to fall between two stools. Those in the audience who know a good bit about Chinese painting are likely to respond by thinking: this is all familiar; why is he giving us this old stuff again? And those to whom the subject is unfamiliar will think: how can he expect us to accept these large claims while presenting so little evidence? If you can imagine being faced with trying to back up some large and controversial proposals about the whole of European painting with only the slides and arguments that will fit into a 50-minute space, you can imagine my predicament. Nevertheless, since I did make some large and controversial claims in my catalog essay, and since there are sure to be readers of it who would like to see some attempt at substantiating these, however hopeless it may be, Im determined to try. Most of what I will say can be found, greatly filled out, in my own writings and those of others. If I refer a number of times to my own writings, then, its not purely conceit (altho that too); I want to take responsibility for the views Ill express, and indicate when Ive made the arguments more fully elsewhere. My argument, to state it baldly, is that the succession of large stylistic shifts that make up a kind of developmental or quasi-evolutionary pattern within a tradition of pictorial art, based in part in a cumulative mastery of representational techniques that make the picture seem more and more lifelike, or true to nature--a developmental pattern, with the idea of progress more or less implicit in it, of the kind that the older historians of European art constructed as a succession of style-periods, from medieval (Romanesque to Gothic) to early and late Renaissance to Mannerist to Baroque to Moder